Learning to Listen to Your Body
Rest is one of the most often overlooked components of staying in shape. It is hard to know when to work through pain, and when to listen to your body and back off and rest. Rest usually isnโt even considered a component to staying in shape. Butย rest is essentialย if you want to continue to exercise.
How much time should you take off? Do you take the time off completely? Will you lose conditioning if you take too much time off? These are all valid questions that can be hard to answer, even if you know about exercise.
Can Obesity Really Shorten Your Life
A study out of McGill University of Canada concluded that obesity not only shortens oneโs lifespan, but it also shortens the quality of oneโs lifespan as well.
Western society has been suffering from an epidemic of obesity. More than one-third of all Americans, or 78.6 million people, are overweight or obese.
The research out of McGill University proved that being obese will shorten your life expectancy by 8 years. Being obese will also reduce the quality of the last two decades of your life, primarily due to managing the health effects of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and osteoarthritis (the long-term health effects of being obese).
Is Diet Really Helping With Your Diet?
Recently big soda manufacturers pledged to cut the calories in their sugar laden soft drinks. While this may seem like a good idea, their motivations may not be completely altruistic.
Consumers have been growing larger and larger as our societyโs obesity epidemic has been reaching epidemic proportions. Many consumers are now demanding lower calorie alternatives to their favorite foods and ย beverages.
But watch out, diet is not all that it is cracked up to be.
The Secret to A High Energy, Feel Good Day!
I have read about it and discussed it numerous times. I highly recommend it. โItโ is eating breakfast.
I have long been a proponent of eating breakfast. When discussing the topic with patients, I always mention a study that concluded that those who skip breakfast are 80% more likely to become obese than those who do eat breakfast.
From what I have read from studies, and what I have observed anecdotally, breakfast sets the stage for how we feel throughout the day. Eating breakfast can affect concentration, focus, energy levels, food cravings, and more throughout the day. Eating breakfast can set us up for having a lethargic, hum-drum day or having a high-energy, feel-good day.
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You Are What You Eat
You’ve heard the saying you are what you eat.
Well, it might just be more true than you think.
Getting to Know Your Body’s Trigger Points
Those of you who have thrown out their backs can attest, a pulled muscle can be more painful that a bone fracture or even than giving birth.
When you throw your back out, you are spraining or straining the muscles in the hips. A sprain or strain is a microscopic tearing of the muscle fibers. It is akin to fraying a rope. The muscle is made up of thousands of muscle fibers. When you pull or sprain or strain a muscle, you are tearing some of the fibers of that muscle.
And when that happens, the rest of the muscle reflexively contracts, to prevent further tearing. This is the start of a trigger point.
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Stretching and Your Muscles
There is so much information on static stretching out there that it can be hard to know if it is good for you or not.
I am a big fan of static stretching.
The more I work with the human body and focus on getting muscles out of pain, and keeping them out of pain, the more important stretching becomes.
The Overlooked & Under-treated Causes of Your Shoulder Pain
You may not know that you have a subscapularis or a serratus anterior, or care. But if you have shoulder pain, you may want to tune in and pay attention.
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Vitamins & Nutritional Supplements
As anyone who reads my articles can attest, I am a big fan of vitamins and supplements.
I believe that when they are taken as designed, as a supplement to a healthy lifestyle, they have a positive effect on our health.
People get in trouble when they take vitamins and supplements as a replacement for a healthy lifestyle. I have heard the mindset of โI donโt have to exercise or watch what I eat since I take vitamins.โ This couldnโt be farther from the truth.
Your New At Home Workout
If you’re like most of us, you hate going to the gym. You want to get fit, but joining a gym is too expensive, too inconvenient, or maybe you’re just the independent type.
No gym? No problem. I’m here to tell you that you don’t need fancy, expensive exercise equipment to get your body back into shape. All you need is to know how to work out properly and which exercises are proper for your body. If you know what you are doing, then you can perform more than enough exercises at home to get you into shape and to keep you there.
